


Means Necessary

by TruckThat



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, And other things which are Not According To Plan, Cannoli Kylux, Featuring truly terrible and inaccurate depictions of hacking, M/M, Undercover Missions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-26
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-17 17:57:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18970168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TruckThat/pseuds/TruckThat
Summary: Here Hux bloody well was, in the access space for the data cache vault next to the bloody gods-damned heat reactor with his splitting headache and an all-systems fire alarm going off. And, of course, with his erstwhile companion. His mission partner.“I cannot believe this is happening,” he hissed at Ren under cover of the klaxons. “I cannot believe I let you goad me.”“No?” Ren drawled. “How little faith you have in yourself. I can believe you'd let me goad you into almost anything.”Or, the one where General Armitage Hux and Commander Kylo Ren go undercover for a very simple recon mission. The goal: to secure critical intel from the Hutt crime lord Belchar Gnuda with as few traceable casualties as possible. They hate each other, sometimes they fuck each other, and everything is going to be completely fine.





	Means Necessary

**Author's Note:**

> Yes friends, it is the year 2019 and I'm just over here posting pre-TFA a/b/o Kylux. Welcome. To, uh... this.

A fire drill. There was a bloody pfassking _fire drill_ , and Intel had only done half of their bloody pfassking _jobs_. One basic fact of every space-faring civilization everywhere was that everyone knew when there was going to be an unannounced fire drill. _Everyone_. It was impossible to keep a fire drill secret; this was as true on a scrapheap satellite in Hutt Space as it was on the Finalizer.

And _yet_.

Intel had somehow failed to provide this piece of obvious, basic, _vital_ first-level scheduling information. And here Hux bloody well was, in the access space for the data cache vault next to the bloody gods-damned heat reactor with his splitting headache and an all-systems fire alarm going off. And, of course, with his erstwhile companion. His mission partner.

 “I cannot believe this is happening,” he hissed at Ren under cover of the klaxons. “I cannot believe I let you _goad_ me.”

 “No?” Ren drawled, and what he was doing with his eyebrows would have been enraging all on its own. “How little faith you have in yourself. I can believe you'd let me goad you into almost anything.”

 “You are—foul,” Hux spat at him. He looked particularly foolish crouched behind the shipping barrel where he'd thrown himself nearly prone when the alarm sounded, and it made Hux want to spit more than usual. “You're unbelievable. You're—you are _damn_ lucky I'm going to get us out of this.”

 “Are you planning to shoot your way out through the rear access panel, General?”

 It's true that Hux was also crouched, blaster drawn, perhaps also looking somewhat idiotic. The lights continued strobing white to dull red as Hux reholstered—quite calmly, he thought. “No, you chump-brained imbecile, I'm going to hack us out. We're standing next to the fucking data banks.”

 “So we are,” Ren said, a parody of graciousness. As if he were capable of it. “Then, by all means.” He gestured an expansive hand towards the nearest databank console. One corner of his horrible mouth tipped up, unable to sustain the illusion for even a second. “A fire drill scheduling conflict does seem like exactly the kind of administrative crisis you thrive on.”

 From the corridor outside came the considerable noise of a station-deck full of Hutts evacuating so slowly that they might just as well have ignored the drill altogether.

Hux took the console to Ren's other side just to be petty. Ren knew _exactly_ how capable Hux was in a crisis, administrative or otherwise, and if he didn't—well, Hux could make him choke on it later. For now, there was the small issue of the unanticipated disruption of the regular patrol schedules they'd been counting on to let them isolate their target. There was also, of course, the high probability of an inspection following the drill, which would put them at serious risk of discovery and exposure.

The first order of business, then: reroute possible inspections, followed by adjusting their rendezvous with the recon shuttle to account for the delay that this was certainly going to cause. Turn off the bloody klaxons while he was at it. Contact with their shuttle was the complicated part—Hux and Ren were themselves equipped only with short-range, fixed-frequency transmitters in case they became separated. A full-scale disruption of this kind to their careful timeline had not been in the calculations. He'd have to transmit out on the satellite base's main frequency, so add accessing the comms frequencies to the order of priority. He was already sweating a little from their hideout's unfortunate proximity to the main heat reactor core.

This was certainly _not_ something that belonged in Hux's list of priorities, but he was distracted by his own... stickiness. How unpleasant this whole misconceived mission was turning out to be.

To add to the unpleasantness, Ren came ambling over to post himself up against the databank where Hux was attempting to salvage their objectives. He leaned in curiously, deliberately looming over Hux's screen to watch as if this sort of thing remotely interested him. He knew exactly where he wasn’t wanted and was determined to be there, more like.

“Kriff off,” Hux snapped, when said looming began to cast a strobe-lit shadow over where he was working. His nearness was already exacerbating Hux's discomfort—he shed heat like a solar reflector at the best of times and worse, with his mask off, he _stared_. “I'm overqualified for this shit, as you very well know, and I’ll crack it faster without your hovering. Go—make yourself useful.”

“Useful... how?” Ren smirked sideways at him, and unfortunately it reminded Hux rather viscerally of various other usefulnesses that Ren had demonstrated in the past. “You want me and my chump brain to go out there undercover? Get our man single-handed?” He slid a little closer and the sliding made Hux _prickle_. “Save the mission while you save our necks?”

Hux curled his lip at him without looking up from the console screen. Ren would not make a convincing agent under any circumstances, but there was really no possible cover story that would explain an undeclared human on board a mediocre Hutt-controlled satellite base. He would also not, Hux thought, make a terribly convincing undercover Hutt. Though perhaps with the Force—no. This would not slide into that sort of farce.

This should have been a simple enough manoeuvre. He tried to shut Ren's useless presence out more firmly.

Ren was in some respects already undercover—in that he was here, in the dark, in what was practically a crawlspace and was certainly adjacent to _several_ crawlspaces, barefaced and therefore unrecognizable as Kylo Ren to almost anyone in the galaxy. Hux however was decidedly _not_ unrecognizable, and to be undisguised and in the field was making him... restless. Anxious. Unable to quite stop himself from jittering foot to foot while he worked.

Hutts could not as a rule distinguish easily between humans—even very distinctive humans, as Hux flattered himself he might be. This was, as he had repeatedly told himself since arriving aboard Delta Satellite S-52, a low-risk deployment as far as risk of personal discovery and humiliation went. It was essential that Kylo Ren be aboard, as the entire point of the mission was to extract sensitive data from Belchar Gnuda without alerting his associates that he had been compromised. Essential, then, that Kylo Ren be unmasked, as in fact the only distinguishing feature he had as far as a Hutt crime lord might be concerned _was_ the mask.

Therefore, it was necessary that his escort—and he _would_ have an escort, Hux would not hear of sending an agent, any agent, in alone, no matter the Supreme Leader's seeming ambivalence on this issue—be someone who could be trusted absolutely with Kylo Ren’s unmasked appearance. His _recognizable_ , assuming one was not a Hutt, appearance. Ideally, then, Ren’s escort was someone who already knew what he looked like. Ideally General Hux himself, who was perfectly capable of conducting a basic infiltration operation even after some time away from the field, who maintained himself to the most rigorous of training protocols, and who moreover was very familiar indeed with Kylo Ren's bare face.

 

“You don't have the balls,” Ren had said, quite casually, in Hux's bed after a long and heated interlude where nothing much was said at all. Barefaced then too.

“For _field recon?_ ” Slighted, Hux had even managed to roll over enough to be properly arch with him rather than just freshly wrung out. “What kind of service record, exactly, do you think a general typically has? I’ll give you a hint: it’s an extensive one.”

“Mm,” Ren's smile had been the same nasty crooked one he wore now—the smile of someone who knew exactly how irritating he was in direct proportion to how unable Hux was to simply order him crushed into a gooey pulp. “One that illustrates his many leadership qualities, I suppose. Officer training from birth, born with a little set of stripes on his arm. Exemplary marks in target practice. Nothing where he might get his shiny boots muddy. Nothing,” he'd reached out lazily and twisted Hux's already-abused nipple, to which Hux bared his teeth and very nearly hissed, “... undignified.”

 

Hux squinted. Even his eye sockets felt somehow overheated, his vision a little blurred. Thinking about Ren's insolence—in bed or out of it—would not find them Belchar Gnuda, nor would it get them off of this hunk of orbiting scrap metal. He paused to loosen the top button of his field drabs. Ren, for all his talk, did not make any effort to go get anything or anyone. He just planted his feet a little farther apart in a way that did _not_ help Hux refocus and carried on watching.

“Is it—complicated?” he asked, still leaning.

“Complicated,” Hux gritted. Ren was at least ten degrees warmer than the already stifling air. He felt himself at the snapping point. Sweat, real sweat, nothing sticky about it, was sliding down the backs of Hux’s knees. “ _Yes_ , it's complicated. And much as I normally relish a challenge, I find I am _not_ relishing the experience of attempting to reprogram a—a floating Hutt _dumpster—_ with you breathing down my _neck_. Will you just—” he heard the way his voice was rising— “will you do _something_ , gods, _please._ _Anything_.” The green readout on the screen pulsed, and the fire alarm strobe pulsed, and the fucking klaxons were just—still—

The klaxons cut out abruptly mid-shriek. A vaguely staticky grunting over the intercom system probably announced that it had all been a drill in Huttese. Hux did have a very rudimentary but functional grasp of Huttese—or so he'd thought. This might as well have been in gibberish, or Aqualish. The secondary firewall, the flimsy software fence that separated Hux from Belchar Gnuda's personal scheduling interface and also from the presumed existence of a facilities inspection rundown, was... resisting.

“Was that you?” Everything about Ren was much too loud for the sudden silence.

“It was not,” Hux snapped, “and you will kindly lower your voice.” The emergency muster point for this level, which he had just now managed to pull up on the console screen, was located just the next sector over. That put only four or five tin-can walls between himself, and Ren who was standing much too close to him still _hovering_ , and hundreds of vile, lurching Hutts.

“Oh,” Ren said, not usefully. Now that there were no blaring alarms, they would be overheard if he didn’t stop his yammering.

Hux tapped in yet another string of command-key workarounds. Perhaps with more violence than was necessary, but his skin was crawling—itching—with the knowledge that anyone could be coming and he would not know. Surely it was standard procedure following an alarm event to conduct checks. Surely even the tertiary data bank vault where they were holed up would merit checking eventually, as it would have on any ship under Hux's command. Surely, _surely_ , even Hutts used some kind of fucking scheduling program, on an operation of this size. A basic one, at least. Somewhere.

“Hux,” Ren said, still not even trying to be quiet, “Are you worried that they're going to send an inspection? Or that they might _not_ inspect? I… know how you feel about drills.”

“I am not,” Hux _slammed_ the enter command, “ _worried_.” There, that had done it.

He blinked, trying to will the lines of text back into focus. It was just a few key strokes to—there—to confirm the status of their particular cache vault as already inspected and secured. Assuming anyone bothered to check. Now for the comms. He took a slow, deep breath and tried not to feel how it shook in his chest. The air fucking _tasted_ like Kylo Ren's sweat, and his own, and he was more and more sure that he was going to lose his mind if they were trapped on board this rust-bucket for another minute. Another second.

And he wanted Ren to himself and away from here rather badly, wanted him alone to take out from him in _flesh_ exactly what he thought of Ren's kriffing usefulness on this mission.

That was _not the point just now._

“Hux,” Ren said again, only there was something very much different in his voice now: something wrong and getting urgently worse. He leaned around Hux's workstation to peer into his face, and Hux closed his eyes against it.

All he had to do was breathe slowly, and keep breathing, and not speed up. And he'd have to open his eyes eventually. Because there was still work to be done. He'd need to see for that.

“Are... are you.” Ren didn't seem able to say it. Hux squeezed his eyes shut even tighter. Squeezed his hands into fists and squeezed his kriffing _thighs_ together and willed Ren not to say it. To walk boldly out through the door and into the flabby arm-stubs of a dozen-odd Hutts before he ever said it. “You're... in heat,” Ren said. “It's your heat.”

“Yes.” Hux managed not to sway where he stood by focusing intensely on the thought of those very Hutts. Stars burst and then retreated behind his eyelids, red on black and throbbing; it wasn’t helping. Hux gave up on it.

“But that's—not. It can’t. You can't be.”

What Ren meant to say, in his graceless way that was somehow both halting and strident, was that _this could not be happening to Hux._ For one thing, these things weren’t at all the way that holoporn would have them. Hux was no wilting damsel enslaved to some—fertility cycle. Not like that. A heat was psychosomatic, _induced_. It was in direct physiological result of an emotional response, and moreover not a response that Hux held any truck with whatsoever.

There might also have been the small issue of the fact that Hux had... not felt it necessary to correct Ren when he had assumed Hux to be another alpha. And then taken him to bed anyway. And then told no one, _as you_ _wouldn’t_ , if you were rolling around with someone of the same alignment against all nature and common sense. And that that had been some time ago now, and ongoing.

So. Possibly Ren’s look of stricken surprise was understandable. In the circumstances.

“Why didn't you—” Ren started up again.

“There are drugs that one takes, when seeing an alpha,” Hux cut him off neatly before Ren could ask anything that might embarrass himself in his ignorance. “Routine precautions.”

“Which you haven't taken.”

“Which I _have_ taken, you ingrate, as recently as this _morning_ —” Hux cut _himself_ off this time. They were indeed routine measures. Medical precautions. Maintenance, essentially.

Only, the fact that it _was_ essential maintenance—that it was essential maintenance taken before a close-quarters undercover reconnaissance mission with Kylo Ren, whom he was _fucking—_ It was a terribly damning admission. The heat suppressants had failed. Possibly, they had failed due to a pattern of prolonged use on Hux's part, for which they were not explicitly indicated.

“Hux,” Ren rasped, and he sounded like a man on the edge of either rage or epiphany, “what do you mean. That you've been taking them.”

“It's possible,” Hux swallowed, trying to moisten his very dry throat, “that I may have developed a... tolerance. To the suppressants.”

“Ah.” His head tilted, very slowly, the same slow, wrathful look he got with prisoners right before he lost his mind. Choosing rage, then. “I see. You thought you could fuck over anyone you felt like, just _fuck_ them, and still keep it a secret. How weak you are for it. And it almost worked. So fucking close.” He stepped in closer, closer, even though he’d already been _so fucking close_. Making Hux sick with it. “How long would you say we've been _seeing each other_ , General? Is that what you say, when you fill the ‘script at the commissary? That you’re _seeing_ someone? And then they think that you’re actually sweet for somebody, maybe. Some fucking beta lieutenant at the commissary wicket, too chickenshit to tell anyone. Gets to get off imagining General Hux being _good_ for his alpha, though. Routinely! Fuck.” He was swept up now, near to shouting, “And how _long_ , Hux, do you think I've thought we were—I've thought you were keeping your gods-damned bed warm with me? With me, _another kriffing alpha?_ That I was—we were—we were dragging each other down into it like a couple of—of deviant fucking—”

“Ren!” Hux had to stop him. Had to. Ren was working himself into a fury and it was—almost hypnotic, how much Hux _wanted_ that. All for himself. All of him. But he was maybe four minutes from his wobbly knees collapsing outright and this could not happen here.

This could not _happen_.

“I thought.” Ren was still staring. He _always_ stared, when he wasn’t screaming, and he’d stopped screaming again. Which was probably more dangerous. “Hux. I thought that we were both, that I was—that you were— _letting_ me—”

“Ren,” and gods he hated how sharp he sounded, how afraid, how much like Ren, “Ren, we've got to call for extraction. I've got to. Right now. It's... we've got to go.” The shaking was everywhere, now, not just in his knees. He turned jerkily back to the databank, blind but desperate to look anywhere, anywhere else.

“Right,” Ren said, sounding vague and wounded. Then: “Right,” jerking up straight, all business now and _fast_. Whatever anger there had been was instantly shelved, and the tantrum that came after seemed to have been postponed. Unfortunately, Hux wasn't in a state to admire this new, efficient side of him. “Got to – right, all right. Mission’s shot anyway. Do you have comms contact with the extraction shuttle?”

Hux groaned. The fucking mission. Belchar Gnuda. “We can't blow the mission. Fuck. Shit, _hells—_ Ren. It's critical intelligence; there’s a fucking plan. We can't.” He wanted Ren. Nothing except Ren, so badly his _teeth_ ached with it. So badly he'd take it here, now, at the—data bank console. The console. The comms frequency. “Oh, _damn_ —”

His legs gave out from under him, never mind that he'd thought there was some time yet. There wasn't. He was out.

Someone yelled Hux’s name.

He ought to have hit the floor hard enough to crack a kneecap. It took him a moment to work out that he hadn’t, and then another to understand that the reason for this was that Ren had, against all expectations, caught him around the waist.

“Right, okay, you’re right. You can’t, that’s fine,” Ren said, right up close against him. Not sounding, necessarily, like he thought this was fine. Hux wanted to agree; it was not. Except Ren was punching at the console with one fucking hand while he said it, chin rested on the crown of Hux’s head now as he craned around him like propping Hux up was nothing. Like he regularly formulated distress signals while nuzzling; like they had ever, even once before, _nuzzled._ Like he could breathe Hux in and if he got enough of a hit, it _would_ be fine. “But you’ve done most of the work; let me see.”

Gods, if Ren was going to be like that... it was hopeless. Months—years—of Hux's tight-held resolve, and for nothing. For bloody Kylo Ren to hold him upright when he couldn't hold himself and get them the hell out of here with no help but his desperation and his sheer bloody-minded competence. Hux wouldn't be able to countenance it.

Bloody Kylo Ren, huge, warm, _solid_ Kylo Ren, Kylo Ren that Hux went to bed with months ago in a fit of rage and adrenaline and then somehow never quite stopped going to bed with—even when he'd had to alter his own med records to double the frequency of his suppressant prescription—even when he _should have stopped—_ He closed his eyes against it, and let himself slump back completely into Ren’s firm, familiar arms.

Bloody fucking gods-damned Kylo Ren was going to save his life.

“Hah!” Ren made a little noise of triumph, or maybe of how very hard he was against the back of Hux’s thigh. It figured—that he was _enjoying_ this shit, now that he was in it, the rescue and the taking all the credit as usual for whatever Hux had been able to salvage almost single-handedly—

There was a catastrophic sound behind them. Like a door wrenching open and a laser-cannon battle held indoors and like the very last of Hux's bulkheads of reserve giving out. When his knees really did hit the floor with a jolt of clarifying pain, Hux realized Ren had, in fact, dropped him. Not gently. Jarred, gasping, with a horrible effort, Hux slewed himself around.

Ah, and the source of the sound: the Hutts had arrived. Not a moment too soon.

From a blank place between pain and excoriating desire, Hux watched Ren run the massive brute that had just burst in the door straight through. Once, with a hideous spitting sizzle. Then twice again when the damn thing kept _moving_.

Hux found that his own body shook too badly to support himself even on his elbows. He sprawled back against the databank where Ren had tossed him and couldn’t even flinch as a stray blaster bolt sparked the light panel out next to his ear. Most of the light in the tiny, sickeningly hot chamber was from Ren's sparking blade, now—time was stretched out like the long edge of hyperspace, but it seemed to Hux that he kept hacking away, on and on until Hux was sure he'd be sick with the smell of sweat and burnt blubber. Eventually it occurred to him that the Hutt hadn't been alone. That had been a Nikto voice screaming, possibly more than one. Probably Nikto firing the blaster shots, too. The Hutt had bodyguards, and Hux was lucky they hadn’t gone for _him_ —or maybe they had, but Ren was cutting them down, and cutting, and cutting. Ren's blade went abruptly dark. It didn't, it turned out, make much of a difference to Hux's hazy vision. He dragged his head up to look anyway.

Only two things were still breathing: Ren and Hux, and they were both panting hard.

 

Somewhere behind Ren the door grated itself shut again, finally, with a screech of hydraulics that were no match for the Force. There was a hollow sort of bang. It did not sound as though it would be opening again, and it certainly didn’t make the vault any better-lit. Trust Ren to hide his mess by sealing them both in with it.

“Well,” Ren said, sounding as raspy as if he'd had the mask on after all, “we've blown the mission.”

“That was _Belchar Gnuda_?” That was a bad thing, he was sure. Hux couldn't pull his focus away from the way Ren's chest heaved, the way he took up so much of the overheated space, to look at the carnage and check.

“It was. It isn’t anymore.”

“Ah,” Hux said, hideously breathy. A sound like his lungs had sprung a leak. That finished things, if not neatly then at least completely. Ren lurched over to Hux and bent low towards him, teeth bared like an animal’s.  In the dark, just the sight of him made something soft in Hux's belly quiver. The very same thing that could not support him at the elbows or at the knees. Hux arched up to meet him, strength enough left only for _this_ —and Ren plucked the blaster deftly from Hux's belt and stepped straight over him.

He shot the rear vent access panel out with two neat bolts and a vicious kick.

“You delisted this sector for inspection?” Ren swung back to Hux, wild-eyed with his hair on end. But he didn't wait for Hux's answer and Hux couldn't answer him—he couldn't have answered anything except _yes_ even if the answer had been no, because Ren had tossed the blaster carelessly through the hole he'd made and into what must have been the vents of the heat sink crawlspace behind. And now his hands _were_ on Hux, hauling at him as if he expected him to resist. He was saying, like a crazy person, “Get in here, General. Get—fucking— _Crawl._ ”

Hux heaved himself to his hands and his soggy knees and somehow, some way, crawled. He would have dragged himself on his belly across a thousand miles of desert for Ren, just then. They’d made it instead to the humming quiet of the ventilation system, him first and Ren in behind, crawling over like he thought he’d get in front and lead them both to anywhere except a dead end.

Crushed up against Ren in this even darker, hotter hole, Hux was for a moment something close to relieved. He had metal at his back here, it was dark and safe and nothing moved, and no one would find them. Ren, though, seemed to have gone very stiff and still. He had a fine tremor of adrenaline that Hux could feel against the whole breadth of his body, despite the way Ren tried to hold himself apart.  Nowhere to go, Ren was cantilevered awkwardly across Hux in the almost total black. He was covered in Hutt blood so fresh it might as well still have been steaming. Hux might have rubbed his face up into it and come in half a second, untouched, just from the horrible stench of it, except that Ren was shaking like he _wanted_ there to be somewhere to go.

This was not—not any kind of plan at all. Hux’s throat worked, dry.

Kylo Ren in battle was a fearsome thing. Kylo Ren, taken to bed, was a rough lover, a terrible one. Inconsiderate, brash, the most single-minded person of Hux's acquaintance.

“Gods _damn_ it, Ren,” Hux hissed. He dug his knee up into the only soft bit he could reach: Ren’s gut. A week ago, a month ago, half an _hour_ ago, that would have been goad enough. Here, now, trapped in an access vent, Kylo Ren was shivering like a wet hidebeast. It was dredging up in Hux a completely different kind of terror. He dug in harder. “Do you think I intend to curl up here with you and kriffing _sleep this off_?” He refused to let his voice shake—he could feel the way it cracked under his words and betrayed him anyway. “We're behind enemy lines, you—you fucking nerf. This is your fucking fault,” he needed to scream it, had to snarl it at a whisper instead, “and you're going to solve it.”

He shoved at Ren with his whole body when the knee didn’t work. With an alarmed grunt, Ren was squashed sideways—Ren _let_ himself be squashed sideways, and this, truly—Hux could never have done it if Ren hadn’t let him. He would _not_ be terrified by it. He would not.  But this was perfect, this was fine, because it meant Hux could wedge himself in underneath and yank Ren back over top, between his thighs, huge and horrible and almost exactly where he damn well belonged. Almost. Except that then Ren was sort of lodged there, hovering, and wouldn’t budge an inch further. As his eyes adjusted, Hux could see that he hadn’t stopped _looking_ at Hux like that: not the insolent stare that Hux wanted to slap off of his face, but the stare that said he was blindsided and afraid.

Hux had tried for years to intimidate him into submission. This, now, Kylo Ren on top of him and _useless_ , was the worst possible time to have succeeded.

“Damn it,” Hux growled again, and his voice _was_ shaking, all right, because he was shaking, because they were both shaking. Two sparking loose wires on the same frequency, set to short the whole base out of the sky once they connected.

Ren stared down and stared and then. Just when Hux could have killed him if only Ren hadn’t thrown Hux’s blaster away, could have killed him and then curled in on himself to make it hurt less or died trying— Ren leaned down, slow, and balked halfway. Hux jerked _up_ and kissed him anyhow. Like this was something Hux could still fight his way out of if he tried, even if he had to fight his way out _with his face_. There was a horrifying, shattering second of Ren so tense it was almost a recoil. But then the sound Ren made in answer was slow, too. Slow and then half-triumphant. Slow the way he closed his eyes to kiss every single kriffing time, even when he kissed like a punch; slow like the emptiness in Hux wasn't empty at all but instead contained a call that could be answered, a pounding surf that could be smoothed into calm. He didn’t have to move them a single centimetre closer to do it. And he didn’t move away, didn’t open his eyes, to talk. “You _are_ all right,” he said. Hux could feel Ren’s whole chest expand with the breath he took. It pressed them together again, properly, finally, belly to belly. “You're all right. Hux. You fucking liar.”

As if he’d ever worried about anyone but himself for even half a second. And with his big square fingers suddenly playing slow havoc all along the back of Hux’s neck. Gently.

“ _Give_ me that,” Hux snarled. “ _Here_.” He fisted one hand in Ren’s hair and meant – you, this, us. Now. And he yanked Ren all the way down, hard as he could, closer than could be managed, like both of their lives depended on it. And also like he wanted to swallow Ren down whole and struggling, because he thought that he might. He smelled, suddenly, to Hux, like something _edible_. Tasted like it, too, oh, once Hux got his tongue on him.

He didn’t even struggle for a second.

“Gods, Hux, _gods._ ” Ren still sounded cracked in half. Maybe Hux’s life did depend on this. The arm Ren wasn’t trying to brace up on he was using now to tug mindlessly at the collar of Hux’s shirt like he thought it would be easier to crawl himself down the neck hole than it would be to shift back long enough to pull it off over Hux’s head. He bit back at Hux’s lips, his chin, the corner of his jaw. Suckled there, useless but needing. “I—” already crushed against Hux, Ren ground in haplessly now, breath wet in his ear, “can I?”

How ridiculous. Hux was under the impression that Ren had never bothered to ask for anything in his life. Had never for one moment been afraid that there was anything he couldn’t have.

“You’re so fucking _hard_ ,” Hux said, with his hands in Ren’s awful, sweaty hair and his knee jammed and bruising up against the ducting so he could press and press and press, and it was the stupidest thing he’d ever said. But Ren was so close now to where he should be. He was _so_ hard. There had been a question: this was Hux’s entire answer.

“Oh,” Ren said into his skin. Hair in his mouth. He nodded frantically, whole body. Agreed so emphatically Hux wanted to laugh only his mouth was full too. “Ohh, uh- _huh_.”

Hux did laugh then—was cackling, cracking his head back into the hollow ductwork and it echoed, probably echoed through the whole damn base, and this was such a kriffing stupid thing to do. Fatally stupid. Half the base was dead in smouldering pieces out there and someone from the half that wasn’t dead yet was going to _notice_. Only because it was Ren and because both of Ren’s huge idiot hands were crushed in between them at long last making quick work of Hux’s flies—and because quick work was what Hux _needed_ and was Hux's only option and, hells, Hux supposed, was their only chance of survival—Hux said, “Yes,” right back, said, “I know,” and muffled his insane laughter up with Ren’s mouth again, not a chance in any galaxy of stopping.

Ren made a low sound, a popping growl that said _offense_ , and worried his teeth into Hux’s lip until it did actually hurt enough to make him quiet. Not enough to make him stop. But then Ren wriggled them both free fucking _finally_ and Hux discovered he didn’t dare keep laughing, really, after all. Or—forgot to. Forgot that there was anything, ever, outside of this quiet place where Ren was touching him.

And touching him, and _pushing_ , and he was pushing Ren _back_ , a completed circle. A whole where Ren was in him, a tearing in half that was all his new raw edges fit exactly to Ren’s.

And Ren, who’d been inside him a hundred times. A thousand times. Who’d never been anywhere but _here_.

Hux was whispering it, “here, _here_ ,” or maybe something else. Just a sound. Aspirated consonants and air that didn’t fit inside his body anymore. Slammed out of him every time Ren breathed, every time Ren _moved_. Ren, against his mouth, inside him everywhere, filling every space there’d ever been, was whispering it too. Breathing as loud as shouting—nothing else to hear.

He came like jamming into a full-systems reset: one rending throb of white-hot pain and then its inverse, everywhere. Over him, Ren froze—all that muscle locked into stone, unbreathing—and when Hux sighed out slow and opened his eyes Ren made a sound like a backwards hiccup and fell _apart_.

It felt like something else entirely, like seeing Ren with all his clothes still on but stripped bare to the soul. Lathered with sweat and wet with come between both their legs and Hux _wanted_ it, how disgusting. And yes, hells, of _course_ Hux knew it was the hormones talking. But somehow Ren, even finished and gasping, was still holding himself up on his elbows, still so close but just far enough to stare down at Hux gobsmacked again. He kept making these tiny sounds, and Hux was so sure they were involuntary, these little murmurs of pleasure and distress and _longing_ —Hux knew them because he felt the echoes of them in his own chest like stones dropped into water—as he touched so carefully at Hux. His brow, his orbital socket, the bridge of his nose. His dazed-blinking eyelashes, the wet hurt at his mouth—Ren scrunched his eyes shut and buried his face at Hux’s throat as though he could not bear another second of his own tenderness.

“What is it?” Hux said, through a terrible, teeth-clenching urge to hold him tight and to hold him forever. “You’re being foolish. I can tell.” He could have said the same thing of himself. He felt frighteningly close to floating out of his own skin—which would go badly, as they were presently trapped—and he twined his fingers into Ren’s hair again to keep him there where he was pinning Hux down.

There was so much wet between them.

Ren gulped against Hux and it came out like a sob or like something gorier than the Hutt he’d just smeared out over three data consoles. Wet-wet. Suddenly Hux didn’t dare to so much as breathe.

“Ben,” Ren said. And stopped. Hux had been wrong; he was not close at all to anything except dread. Not now with _that_ dropped in between them, too. “Ben’s mother, she said. To him. It doesn’t work like that, she said. Being with an omega. It isn’t automatic, isn’t… power. There’s got to be,” he swallowed thickly, his voice gone strange and sing-song, “a boy. An alpha. That an omega really _likes_. Only…” he sighed, just once, so soft against Hux’s throat. “Only no one ever liked Ben Solo.”

Hux let this ricochet around in his chest, between his ribs. The sheer, terrible hubris of thinking it could be possible to do this, to do any part of this, with Kylo _fucking_ Ren.

“I don’t know,” Hux said, feeling the traps out of it slowly, “that I ever met Ben Solo. But he always seemed to me to be a singularly hateable little boy. And—I _do_ know something about little boys who are hated.” He let his hands wander, ran his fingers over the curious and familiar topography of the shell of Ren’s ear. He would not be found a coward in this, or in any other thing. “It strikes me that Ben might have made himself into someone quite different, since then.”

How complicated, how carefully made and by what great chance, were all the tiny parts of the human body. How close they were to being nothing but blood and gunk and mess, were things to fall apart even a little. He _felt_ it when Ren relaxed. Not just the tension in his body. There was a soundless creak in the whole place, like the fucking _walls_ relaxing.

“Kylo Ren,” Hux said, not afraid, not afraid, matter-of-fact because one of them had to be, “you are going to kill us both.”

Ren sighed again: a different category of sigh, one that pressed his huge nose into the side of Hux’s neck like an affectionate afterthought to this train of conversation. Still half panting but now just in the way he always was after sex, which was a particular familiar way and which Hux both knew exactly and hated himself for knowing. “Nah,” Ren said, after a bit of this nonsense. Just when Hux let himself think that perhaps they wouldn’t talk further, and just as if Hux’s remark was indeed a discussion he’d invited. What an oaf Ren was, after all. “Blaze of glory, for both of us.”

Against every better instinct, it made Hux want to coddle him even more.

Eventually, Ren flopped off of Hux so that they lay wedged mostly side-by-side in matching exhaustion instead. It was maybe a five percent improvement over lying squashed together all anyhow in their own juices like a pair of tinned sillafish. Hux watched him anyway. He breathed carefully in time until they were both breathing almost normally and he didn’t really need to be watching at all. Ren’s white slice of belly where his shirt rucked up was the most misfortunately, sweetly vulnerable thing, even slick as it was with Hux’s mess. And somewhat tacky with blood, as well.

Not his own blood.

“ _Gods_.” Hux slumped back and threw his forearm over his own eyes so that he couldn’t see any of it anymore. “Fuck. Ren. The fucking Hutts.”

This, _infuriatingly_ , Ren decided was the appropriate time to laugh. Flat on his back like an absolute lunatic who suddenly didn’t care that if they didn’t move, Hux was going to die with his trousers mostly off. Eventually. When someone on board lucked into enough competence to notice that there’d been a massacre.

He was half-hard again, honestly. Still tingling a little, in a throbbing way that really—

Fucking Hutts indeed.

Hux really did want Ren tucked back in at his throat, safe out of the way where he couldn’t make such a gods-damned mess of everything. He wanted that quite badly, in fact. He wanted it always. Orgasm always had such a clarifying effect on his thinking. “I’ll call in protocol five. Cut our losses—you’ll have to chop our way out, quick and loud as you can. If I can find my damn blaster, I’ll even be able to afford us some cover.” The extraction team would be in place by now; he’d managed that much. And his knees would hold out now for at least a little while. Barring further setbacks and provided that Ren saw fit to pull his clothes back together sooner rather than later. “Or just—just help me out of this fucking duct so I can set this entire scrap-pile to detonate as soon as we’re off it. Just do _something_.” He kicked at Ren as best he could, given that their legs were still literally tangled.

“Mmm,” Ren slurred, and stopped laughing _almost_ like he was trying to fucking control himself, except for how he obviously wasn’t. Also, how he kicked Hux back. “Both. Let’s do both.”

But Ren hauled himself out and then Hux out after: with the Force because gods knew he couldn’t do a single damn thing for himself. A rattle down the venting even turned out to be Hux’s blaster, butting itself into his hand seemingly under its own power. Ren also managed, somehow, through the ever-present miracle of the Force, to use his mysteriously free hands to cop a good handful of Hux’s ass on the way by. Fucking of _course_. Briefly, Hux contemplated whether it was worth the administrative hassle of murdering Ren and writing it into the mission report as a casualty.

 

In the end, they did in fact do both.

Strapped in next to Ren on the extraction shuttle, shattered debris in the viewscreen giving way to the blank field of a hyperspace jump, Hux was on the whole inclined to be glad of Ren’s living presence after all. He was at very least, someone warm and semi-cooperative and roughly the right height to nap against. It went a long ways towards preventing Hux from getting a truly horrendous stiff neck, as one otherwise might after dozing on the shuttle. The nap itself could be excused—an unavoidable consequence of a mission gone badly awry and of the extreme amounts of energy Hux had expended in order to salvage the situation with only one First Order casualty written into the report after all. Hux felt no shame about it whatsoever.

The unfortunate airlock-related death of the ensign who rode with them, their sole casualty, was also eminently excusable: the man’s own fault, really, for not having the sense to sit in another kriffing compartment, and for therefore having witnessed Commander Kylo Ren fussing with the harness on Hux’s seat before securing his own. There was simply no need for the news of that kind of breach of basic safety protocol to circulate amongst the troops.


End file.
